ships

Topic confusion continues with yet another new topic for consideration - this time copied from The Ladybird Book of Talking Down to Kids. No idea why I picked out something so obviously below my reading standard - presumably because there was nothing else available - but I can’t imagine I enjoyed it. Maybe the stuff I’d been doing the past few weeks was a little info-heavy, but there’s no way I would have deliberately scaled it back this much. Plus I had zero interest in ships and/or anything aquatic. Thinking about them now is giving me a headache. So if this wasn’t a punishment, it certainly must have felt like one. But even though it’s so alarmingly babyish, I still manage to get the title wrong. Even a landlubber like me knows that boats and ships are entirely different things, and the captain is likely to get mighty offended if you dumb his ship down to boat status. This text is clearly about boats. The only reason I’ll forgive myself for this is if the book I copied it all from was actually called ‘Ships’ and I don’t see that being especially likely. Beyond that, there’s not much to say. The pictures are awful. What is that wobbly stuff on the first page? Are they clouds? Is it smoke? What’s that bizarre structure in the water? Are the boys sailing towards a burning oil rig? Maybe if it’s an oil disaster, that might explain why I was so interested in it. That I could go for. The Ladybird Book of Marine Oil Disasters. I did try looking to see if I could find out what book this actually is, but no luck so far. The one thing I have learned is that Ladybird books were actually on the whole far more verbose and in-depth than this. Which doesn’t help. Good job I only did two pages of it then. Next stop: Sport!

January 1980

Ships